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In his ending, Dhalsim wins the tournament and returns home on his elephant Kodal. Three years later, Dhalsim's son, Datta, discovers a photograph of his father from the tournament. From the original Street Fighter II and up until Super Street Fighter II, this ending graphic was drawn in a comical style. In Super Street Fighter II Turbo, it was changed to a more realistic style, with Dhalsim's wife and son - Sari and Datta, respectively - added to it.

Dhalsim is often depicted as having pupil-less eyes. His build is that of a normal man who exercises and weight trains regularly except for his abdomen and waist which appear much out of proportion and emaciated. He wears torn saffron shorts as his only clothing attire as well as saffron wristbands and anklebands. He has three colored stripes adorning his head, and in the Street Fighter Alpha series, he wears a turban, that he removes before battle. His fighting style is a Yoga-based style, in which Dhalsim can stretch his arms, legs, abdomen and even his neck to great lengths making him a decent long-range hand-to-hand fighter. He also uses many fire-based attacks such as Yoga Fire, Yoga Flame and Yoga Blast, the latter being an anti-air technique. His super move in the Street Fighter EX, Cross Over and later Alpha Series was the Yoga Inferno, which was basically a multi-hitting flamethrower-style attack that could be directed manually. Dhalsim also uses a teleportation technique known as the Yoga Teleport (M. Bison would later gain this ability in Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors Dreams). In Street Fighter EX3, he gains a tag-team super move when paired with Blanka. In Street Fighter IV he uses the ultra combo move "Yoga Catastrophe", as a large fireball which slowly moves toward and deals multi-damage on impact on any opponent, before using a super, "Yoga Inferno".

In the Street Fighter II V, the UDON comic book series, and Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Dhalsim is a wise and powerful mystic who has mastered the inner mysteries of Yoga. In the comic, he helps prepare Sagat for his bout with Ryu and helps Ryu himself discover the darkness within his soul. Later on he is given an invitation to M. Bison's "Street Fighter II" global fighting tournament, wherein he defeats Adon in the preliminaries with ease.

In the anime series Street Fighter II V, Dhalsim is a monk who lives in a remote village in India. Sagat had earlier instructed Ryu to seek Dhalsim for advice about the Ways of Hadou. Sagat had been turned down years before when he sought Dhalsim's wisdom, but had figured that Ryu might be found more worthy. Dhalsim is a practitioner of yoga and has some psychic abilities, and although he knows much about Hadou, he was unable to train Ryu to use the Hadouken, which was inadvertently triggered in Ryu's body during a lesson. Dhalsim is voiced by Shōzō Iizuka in the Japanese version and Steve Blum in the English dub.

Dhalsim was portrayed by Roshan Seth in 1994's live action film Street Fighter. In the movie, Dhalsim was changed from a fighter to a meek doctor working on a "supersoldier" experiment for Bison. His science was originally supposed to promote peace, but Bison corrupted it to serve perversion instead. In the end (after being branded by the mutagen used to create Blanka, thus assuming his appearance in the game series), he decided to remain in Bison's base alongside with Blanka to await its destruction, uttering the last words, "If good men do nothing, that is evil enough."

Dhalsim is later featured in the Street Fighter animated series as part of Guile's team. From the original roster of Street Fighter II characters featured in the film, Dhalsim and T. Hawk are the only ones who do not appear as playable characters in the video game based on the film, Street Fighter. The opposite situation occurs with Akuma, who is a secret character in the game but does not appear in the film.

In 1992, Dhalsim ranked at number five in the list of Best Characters of 1991 by the Gamest magazine in Japan.[2]IGN ranked Dhalsim at number eight in their list of top Street Fighter characters, noting his unique gameplay and role as a "popular oddball".[3]The Guardian ranked him as the 15th top Street Fighter character in 2010, with writer Ryan Hart saying his abilities to extend his limbs "changed the way you see fighting game characters".[4] He additionally placed number fourteen on GameDaily's list top Street Fighter characters of all time.[5] He was also included in their list of the top 25 "baldies" by GameDaily.[6] In 2013, Complex placed Dhalsim third in a list of "12 Old School Video Game Characters Who Were Style Icons".[7]

Topless Robot named him one of the "most ridiculously stereotyped" fighting game characters, calling him the most outlandish of Street Fighter II '​s cast and drew comparisons to the Indian assassin in the film Master of the Flying Guillotine.[8] The satirical book A Practical Guide To Racism, implicitly criticizes his portrayal as a sum of negative stereotypes of South Asians, where Hindus are portrayed as "nonviolent, magical, fastidious, stretchy, and pugnacious".[9] The book Game Design Perspectives notes Dhalsim as an example of a "nemesis character" in video games, one difficult to master proper usage of but widely considered one of the strongest characters in the game as well.[10] Dhalsim's signature attack, Yoga Fire, was used by a fictionalized version of Mohandas Gandhi (played by Keegan-Michael Key) at the beginning of "Gandhi vs. Martin Luther King Jr.", the 14th episode of the second season of Epic Rap Battles of History, a YouTube musical comedy series that depicts historical figures engaged in rap battles.[11]